New York has drafted its application to get out from under provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act and has been getting lots of feedback on how to improve its plan before submitting it to the U.S. Department of Education later this month.

New York will be the third among the "Big Seven" states—home to most of the nation's English learners—to formally seek a waiver. Florida and New Jersey were among the 11 early bird states that applied. And according to the Ed. Department's ESEA flexibility page, Arizona and Illinois will seek waivers too.

California is among a handful of states that have expressed deep reservations about the requirements of the waivers. And Texas hasn't given a clear signal on what it will ultimately do.

So that brings us back to New York, where advocates for English learners are asking writers of the state's waiver application to provide more details on how it will address the needs of ELLs.

In a letter to the state department of education, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund finds much to praise in the New York plan, including the state's effort to update its ELL standards and align those with the common standards, as well as the assessment used to measure English language proficiency.

But the letter outlines areas of concern, too. Chief among them is New York's plan to continue testing any ELL in grades 3-8 who has been enrolled for more than one year on the state's English/language arts exam, and using those results for accountability purposes. The letter says the state's plan would benefit from more specifics on how it will tailor interventions for ELLs as a whole and even more specifically for the diversity of ELLs in New York, such as long-term English learners and students with interrupted formal education.

We'll stay tuned to see if New York makes changes to its plan based on this feedback.

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Georgia lawmakers are debating a measure that would actually bar undocumented students from the state's public colleges and universities. The bill, say its supporters, is designed to keep illegal immigrants from taking spaces in Georgia's higher education system from legal residents.

In a hearing on the legislation yesterday, opponents—including some undocumented students—gave some gut-wrenching testimony about how the bill would kill their hopes and dreams.

The state already has a tough policy for undocumented students who want to attend its most elite campuses such as Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. If those schools turn away academically qualified students—and they do routinely because of the demand to enroll in those schools—then they can't admit students who do not have legal status. And undocumented students who enroll in the state's other public institutions must pay out-of-state tuition.

The new measure would go even further by keeping students out of all of the state's public campuses if they don't have legal status.

If the legislation were adopted, Georgia would join just three other states with outright bans on undocumented students attending public colleges: Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina. Most other states that have wrestled with issues around illegal immigrants and higher education have focused on so-called Dream Acts, which have sought to provide in-state tuition levels and access to financial aid.

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For years, students who enrolled in U.S. schools with language skills other than English have not received much support in the school setting to keep developing proficiency in their native languages to become truly bilingual, biliterate adults.

But today's Houston Chronicle has an interesting story on the rising popularity of heritage language courses in the public schools there in the Houston area that may signal that some change is afoot. The heritage courses are designed to help students who are already fluent in English, but growing up in households where another language is spoken, maintain and strengthen literacy in their native languages.

More than 57 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number alone would suggest that there could be strong demand for K-12 schools to help the students in those homes keep and develop their heritage language. But the polarizing politics around immigration and bilingual education is one reason why creating and funding such programs has been difficult.

Heritage speakers aren't likely to benefit as much in a regular foreign-language class with non-native speakers, experts say. They need different curriculum and instructional strategies tailored for their more-sophisticated language skills.

While the Chronicle story says that the "number of programs and languages offered has exploded" in high schools and colleges over the last decade, it doesn't report any actual data. The National Heritage Language Resource Center is collecting survey data from colleges and universities on an ongoing basis to compile a database of heritage-language programs in higher education.

And the Center for Applied Linguistics has also built a database of heritage-language programs across the spectrum of community-based programs, school-based programs, and those in higher education. The CAL database has collected information on more than 60 school-based heritage programs nationwide and 263 community-based programs.

I'd like to learn more about programs that have sprung up and are flourishing in K-12 public schools, so please send any that you know of my way.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Texas policymakers are putting the onus on the state's colleges and universities to notify undocumented students who pay in-state tuition rates that they must hold up their end of the deal and seek legal status.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ruled yesterday that the state's higher education institutions must send annual notices to undocumented students reminding them to pursue legal status by contacting federal authorities. Those notices will start going out as early as this summer.

The change comes more than a decade after Texas became the first state to pass "Dream Act" legislation that allows eligible undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates and public colleges and universities. Under the Texas' law, students must sign an affidavit promising to seek legal status but no entity has been directly tasked with the responsibility for following up.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry's support for in-state tuition for undocumented students and his strong statements on the issue have been blamed, in part, for his failure to become a viable candidate in the GOP presidential primary sweepstakes.

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For a few minutes during last night's debate in Florida, three of the four GOP presidential candidates explained why they believe English should be the official language of the United States.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney were asked specifically why they support a policy of printing government documents—and potentially election ballots—only in English, but have no qualms about running Spanish television and radio advertisements seeking votes.

Gingrich's answer was to point out that while Spanish is the most widely-spoken language in the U.S. after English, it is just one among hundreds of others. To unify the country, he argued, requires a single language that all citizens share. He seemed to suggest that political campaigns are different because candidates have always been "willing to go to people on their terms and their culture..." to win support.

He also said that ballots should be in English, but that there could be programs "where virtually everybody would be able to read the ballots." (PK12, by the way, explains Gingrich's position on the federal DREAM Act legislation.)

Romney, in a rare moment of agreement with Gingrich during last night's debate, said his opponent was "right," before pivoting to to talk about how in Massachusetts in 2002, he "campaigned for English immersion in our schools."

Notably, when Romney was campaigning for governor in 2002, it was at the same time that voters were considering a ballot initiative to end bilingual education. Roger Rice, a Massachusetts-based civil rights lawyer who works on issues related to English learners, recalls that folks from both political parties, including the Republican governor at the time, Jane Swift, had come out to oppose Question 2—the ballot initiative to limit bilingual education—in favor of a legislative solution to ensure that more English learners in the state would learn the language.

But Romney, according to Rice, decided to make the matter a "wedge issue," especially since his Democratic opponent, Shannon O'Brien, also favored the legislative solution backed by Gov. Swift. In his book that came out last year, Romney highlighted his position on bilingual education vs. English immersion.

Congressman Ron Paul—sticking to his belief that the federal government ought to leave states and localities to govern themselves—said that while English should be the national language, federal policymakers ought not to meddle in decisions about which languages appear on ballots.

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum didn't get a shot at answering the question, but I doubt his answer would have differed much from his opponents, given his own stance on English-only.

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More than 60 elementary schools in Florida are the focus of a new research project that will examine how English-language learners fare after receiving a new science curriculum that is designed to also reinforce their language development.

Okhee Lee, an education professor at New York University and a well-known expert on ELLs and science, is working on the project with two other NYU colleagues. A $4.5 million National Science Foundation grant is paying for the four-year study that seeks to illuminate how science achievement can be improved for ELLs.

Science achievement for students learning English trails that of their peers, a problem, Professor Lee says, that is exacerbated by the urgency to teach ELLs to read and do math. Often, she says, ELLs don't receive science instruction at all.

Lee has developed a curriculum and professional development for teachers known as "Promoting Science among English Language Learners (P-SELL)," which has been used in the Miami-Dade school system. Sean Cavanagh wrote about the Miami-Dade project for Education Week a few years ago.

With P-SELL, elementary teachers receive a lot of training to boost their science content knowledge and instructional strategies for teaching the content to ELLs. In Miami-Dade, science and math scores rose for ELLs who were part of the P-SELL program.

With this new grant, Lee and her colleagues are branching out to elementary schools in Jacksonville, Fort Myers, and Orlando, where half of the schools will use the P-SELL curriculum and professional development program and half will use the science curriculum adopted by their home school districts.

I am certain the results of this project will be highly anticipated, and hopefully, we will hear progress reports along the way. The project should wrap up by the end of 2015.

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As of this month, California has a new honcho to oversee statewide efforts to improve education for the state's 1.5 million English-language learners.

State schools chief Tom Torlakson has tapped Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, a professor at San Diego State University, to lead the California Department of Education's English Learner Support Division. Cadiero-Kaplan, who chairs the Department of Policy Studies in Language and Cross Cultural Education at San Diego State, has also been a classroom teacher and taught ESL at the community college level.

Cadiero-Kaplan has published a great deal on literacy and bilingual education.

A division focused exclusively on the needs of California's ELLs had been broken up and moved around within the state education department after 1998 when voters mandated that bilingual education programs be dismantled in favor of English immersion. Torlakson re-established the ELL shop last summer and also set up an "English Learner Integrated Action Team," which is charged with creating what the education department calls a "statewide plan" for ELLs.

I'm looking forward to seeing what a new, statewide plan for ELLs in California will entail.

Certainly, with one in four public school students in the state designated as an English learner, this population of students should be at the front and center of all the education policy discussions in California. Like all states that have adopted the common core standards, California will be wrestling with how to adapt the new standards for ELLs, and figuring out how to assess them. An important and tall order for that team and its new leader.

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Good morning readers. Let's kick off this short work week with a long post on English learners from a former Los Angeles elementary school teacher who is guest blogging over at Rick Hess Straight Up.

Patricia Dickenson, who writes mostly about the ELL experience in California, uses the occasion of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to highlight the policies and practices she sees as inequitable in public schooling for English learners.

Among her major points:

• Many ELL teachers are new to the profession and lack the seasoning that comes from years of experience;


• Too many English learners in middle and high school are tracked into courses based on their language proficiency rather than content ability, particularly in math and science; and


• ELL students of different abilities and levels of proficiency are too often lumped together in classrooms.

What every day policies and practices do you see as major impediments to higher achievement for English learners?

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To boost its shot at earning a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act, Florida has to make major revisions to its proposal, especially when it comes to the state's English-language learners.

That feedback—from a panel of judges selected by the U.S. Department of Education—came to Florida late last month. All 11 states seeking waivers from NCLB requirements received detailed feedback from the judges as part of the peer-review process which has mostly happened out of the public eye despite pledges to the contrary. Michele McNeil at Politics K-12 has followed this process like a hawk. She alerted me to the Florida feedback letter, which Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) reporter Jeff Solochek published on his Gradebook blog.

Minnesota's feedback is also in the public domain, thanks to Minnesota Public Radio, but none of the other states' letters from the Ed. Dept. appear to be available for the masses. This state also has some work to do on how it will target interventions for ELLs, according to the judges' feedback.

The judges who read Florida's waiver application singled out what appears to be a lack of significant interaction with stakeholders in the state's English-language-learner world, which I noted in November after first reviewing the proposal. They are asking the state to hand over "more specific information on the steps Florida took to meaningfully engage diverse stakeholders and communities, especially organizations representing English Learners" and how it will continue to interact with those folks as it puts its plan into practice. It appears that Florida consulted only with the state chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.

The reviewers also advise Florida to make several other substantial changes or clarifications.

One is that the state needs to better make its case that the achievement of English-language learners, as well as students with disabilities, is fully included in how schools are rated in Florida's grading system. The state needs to ensure that the performance of students like ELLs is not "masked" by its plan to lump students who fall into one of the traditionally low-performing subgroups into one group labeled "lowest-performing 25%."

Finally, the reviewers raise concerns about the state's lack of specificity when it comes to addressing the needs of ELLs in its plans for intervening in low-performing schools and building teacher capacity.

Now we'll have to wait and see how much Florida and the other states revise their waiver proposals based on the feedback. It's encouraging that the reviewers seem to be keeping a sharp eye out for the needs of English learners.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By now, most everyone has heard how Mitt Romney's family roots reach deep into northern Mexico, in the state of Chihuahua. Romney's father, George, was born in Mexico, where his American citizen grandparents had earlier fled to avoid prosecution for polygamy. When George Romney was five, his parents moved the family to the U.S. to avoid the violence of the Mexican Revolution.

But another branch of the Romney family remained in Chihuahua, and its members have been bilingual, bicultural, and dual citizens of Mexico and the U.S. for years. The story about Mitt's Mexican and American second cousins got high-profile treatment last night on Brian Williams' show, "Rock Center".

Reporter Mike Taibbi interviewed three of those cousins, who have grown up in Mexico and have raised their own families there in two small colonias in Chihuahua.

As a dual citizen who speaks both English and Spanish, cousin Leighton Romney tells Taibbi that he loves Mexico and the United States.

"We certainly have a love for both countries," adds Leighton. "I can sing both national anthems, and tear up at both of them. I think that having two countries that you love and two countries that you can serve or be a beneficiary of their service is a great thing."

Given Romney's position on the federal DREAM Act (he's opposed), as well as the position he took as Massachusetts governor on bilingual education (he supported scrapping it), it would be fascinating to hear Romney talk about how or whether he considered his own family's Mexican heritage as he formed his stances on immigration and language policy.

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